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Alias: I See Dead People

"Sydney and I never went to Cartagena. And just for the record, you're a terrible kisser."

So I guess Anna Espinosa wasn't the woman on Page 47, after all.

Not that I mind, because it's almost like revisiting SD-6. We're back to Sloane as the bad guy. Back to Sydney as the double agent determined to bring him down. I really haven't been much into the Anna/Sydney identical cousins thing, but I love the prospect of Sydney, super double agent, masquerading as Anna to bring down Prophet Five. What an utterly superior plot twist.

And Vaughn is finally back! Just as in the previous episode with Nadia, I was getting that fatalistic "Oh, no, Vaughn's gonna die" feeling. (Thankfully, I was wrong this time.) I spent most of the episode wanting to smack him upside the head, though. Sydney shows up out of the blue, no clinch, no mad kisses, and he doesn't suspect something's wrong? It's not like he didn't know what happened to Francie. If he hadn't known it wasn't Sydney all along, I would have had to throw something at the television screen.

I just had one problem with that whole scenario. If Vaughn suspected right away that Sydney wasn't Sydney, why did he let a strange, dangerous woman masquerading as his lover cut into his chest with a scalpel? (And was Anna cutting on Vaughn shuddery or what?) The whole corresponding thirty-year-old data chip thing was pretty bizarre, sort of like broken pendants worn by two separated siblings that end up finding each other. Why Vaughn and Renee? Do all of the people involved with Prophet Five put chips in their kids? Are there other pairs of chips out there looking for each other?

Nadia as a ghost was also interesting and strange. Have they ever done ghosts before on Alias? Not that she was actually a ghost. She was obviously just Sloane, overwhelmed with guilt, talking to himself. Even though I can't guess what's going on in his head, Nadia's ghost implies that Sloane is hanging on to his humanity. He didn't kill Nadia deliberately, after all. He didn't like seeing Anna as Sydney's double, and had no desire to see Sydney hurt. (Yes, I know that Sloane has always professed fondness for Sydney, but still.)

It was only for a minute, but our dear Julian Sark is finally back, too. Did Sloane just recruit Sark? I sure hope so. I don't even care what side he's on, just as long as he's back for the big finish.

Bits and pieces:

— The list of "special guest stars" made me go woo-hoo three times: Michael Vartan, Mia Maestro, David Anders.



— Dan says Anna always underestimated Sydney. In the end, it cost her her life. Anna underestimated Vaughn, too. When it came right down to it, as full of wild skills as she was, Anna just wasn't a good enough actor to pull it off.

— I wonder what Vaughn is going to find in his father's secret map room slash Wall of Weird.

— Sloane has an interesting dynamic with Peyton; she's not his intellectual equal, and he's already manipulating her.

— Nadia's funeral had lots of people who loved her and worked with her, contrasted with Renee's impersonal and rather ugly autopsy. Poor Renee. By the way, I saw Mia Maestro's eyelid move while she was in her coffin. Was the editor not on the ball?

— Scary truck accident, and it sure looked fatal. Although I never once thought they'd kill Sydney off at this point.

— Tom wrote, "Contact made awaiting response." I think he was decoding a message in the paper. And then he put a response in the classifieds. Still no resolution on what Tom is doing. But the fact that he was doing it at work made me think he's still working for Jack. We shall see.

— A movie date? Was Rachel hitting on Tom? If he is indeed evil, her track record isn't very good. She hit on Sark, too.

— In one of the earlier scenes, Jennifer Garner did a very good job mimicking Gina Torres.

— Why didn't Vaughn have a cell phone just for an absolute emergency?

— I've seen some real fifteenth century manuscripts. That was definitely not anything like a fifteenth century manuscript. Bad prop department, no biscuit.

Quotes:

Jack: "Must be genetic. You used to wake up at four a.m. every day, like clockwork."
Sydney: "I'm sorry about that."

Anna: "In this business, it's always the children who suffer."
Funny how that can be applied to so many characters other than Isabelle: Sydney, Vaughn, Renee, Nadia.

This week's...

... itinerary: Zurich, Geneva, and Hamburg. And we spent a lot of time in Nepal. (Everyone got there using Royal Buddha Airlines. I don't know why, but I find that hilarious.)



Three spies, mostly for the last ten minutes,

Billie
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Billie Doux loves good television and spends way too much time writing about it.

1 comment:

  1. This phrase from Anna Espinosa got me thinking: "I always said that Sydney was too good for you." Sometimes I have that feeling too! Yes, I know, he is a sweet and good boy but ... Sorry Vaughn! May be I expect too much after seeing Roy Dupuis's Michael. I can't stop thinking that Michael Vaughn is a boy and Michael Samuelle is a man.

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